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Municipalities and prefecture-level cities are not each a "city" in the strictest sense of the term, but instead an administrative unit comprising, typically, both an urban core (a city in the strict sense) and surrounding rural or less-urbanized areas usually many times the size of the central, built-up core. Prefecture-level cities nearly always contain multiple counties, county-level cities, and other such sub-divisions. To distinguish a prefecture-level city from its actual urban area (city in the strict sense), the term "市区" (shìqū; "urban area") is used. However, even this term often encompasses large suburban regions often greater than 1,000 square miles (3,000 km2), sometimes only the urban core whereas the agglomeration overtake the city limits. Thus, the "urban core" would be roughly comparable to the US term "city limit", the "shìqū or urban area" would be roughly comparable to "metropolitan area", and the municipality is a political designation defining regions under control of a municipal government, having no comparable division.

The cities are listed by built-up area adjusted to Local Government Authorities encompassed by built up area (i.e. Districts, Cities or Counties). Thus, these built up area can be made of several cities (e.g. : Guangzhou - Dongguan - Shenzhen, Shanghai - Suzhou, Shenyang - Fushun, Anshan - Liaoyang etc.) The population of the official Chinese urban area is listed beside. The larger municipality figure is the wider administrative area population, which includes suburban and rural areas as of the 2010 census.[1]

Incl. Macau and southern part of Zhongshan but not eastern part of Zhuhai prefecture not yet urbanized. Satellite views show that Zhuhai-Macau conurbation is being included into Guangzhou-Shenzhen built-up area.